The Floating Library

By Kevin Hartnett themillions This past winter I wrote a pair of essays about The Brothers Karamazov that included the admission that I preferred “Tolstoy’s ability to see the angles of everyday life to Dostoevsky’s taste for the manic edges of experience.”  That line elicited more of a reaction from readers than anything else I wrote, which prompted me to dive deeper into the [...]

Read Full Post »

Okay. That’s probably the most racist thing you’ve said all day, imaginary amalgam of all the careless hipsters in the world. You know how you can tell that black people are still oppressed? Because black people are still oppressed. If you claim that you are not a racist person (or, at least, that you’re committed to [...]

Read Full Post »

By Stephen Marche theatlantic YVETTE VICKERS, A FORMER Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role inAttack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year [...]

Read Full Post »

The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. – Stephen Marche theatlantic

Read Full Post »

I am always happier when I have a book in progress. Living with a book in process is like living an alternative reality. You are out of time, it is a kind of transport, a kind of addiction. – Susan Gubar chronicle

Read Full Post »

Nearby, another group was being brought up: my gaze met that of a beautiful young woman, almost naked but very elegant, calm, her eyes full of an immense sadness. I moved away. When I came back she was still alive, half turned onto her back, a bullet had come out beneath her breast and she [...]

Read Full Post »

Read Full Post »

When Eric Althoff answered a Craigslist ad for a copy editor for a publication with adult content, he had no idea that he’d soon work for one of the most famous (or infamous) magazines in America: Hustler. But that’s exactly what Althoff did for four years, editing copy for the pornographic magazine and doing some [...]

Read Full Post »

In England in the sixties and seventies I was often out and about leading the literary life, and I met a surprising number of my heroes without really seeking to. The real surprise, each time, was that they were all in character. One night in Hull I was performing a cabaret act in the student [...]

Read Full Post »

“It was yesterday, five hours later than now, That the twelve hundred and sixty-sixth year fell Since the road here was ruined. I’m sending a crew Out of my company in that direction To see if sinners are taking the air. You go With them, for they’ll not harm you in any fashion. Come, Alichino [...]

Read Full Post »

You say just ice cream, I say justice cream. –Kevin T. Keith comments

Read Full Post »

By Pamela Paul nytimes With no small amount of trepidation, I lay open here the first page of my diary — high-­schoolish stabs at intellectualism, fleeting girlish obsessions, deliberately obscure annotations and all. After many failed adolescent attempts at keeping a journal, the summer after my junior year in high school, I finally found a [...]

Read Full Post »